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Saturday, April 14, 2012

The Peerless Prognosticator is ON THE AIR!!! -- Game 2/Eastern Conference Quarterfinals: Capitals at Bruins, April 14th

The Peerless Prognosticator is ON THE AIR!!!

It's Game 2 and a chance for the Washington Capitals to get back in the series, take home ice advantage, and bring their fans off the ledge... not necessarily in that order. Let's get to it. How might they do this. One hint comes from looking at shot graphics (courtesy of the Washington Post). For games over the past two years we can break up the Caps' goals and shots and superimpose "the home plate of joy (HPOJ)" over them to see how well the Caps have done in wins and losses. For those 16 games (in which the Caps were 7-9) we get this...

So, what are we looking at here? In seven wins the Caps had 42 percent of their shots in the HPOJ. In losses, 35 percent. But here is the kicker, kids. The percentage of goals scored in the HPOJ is almost indistinguishable in wins (71.4 percent) from those scored there in losses (70.6 percent).

We could spend a lot of words here going deeper and deeper into those numbers, but if you are going to score roughly 70 percent of your goals from prime scoring chance areas, the object of the exercise then becomes, get more shots from there.

So what happened in Game 1 against the Bruins?...

...two shots from the HPOJ and no goals. Are we clear on what has to be done here?

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